For brunch chef Adam Schop sprinkles shredded coconut onto his pancake batter; when the pancakes cook on the griddle, the coconut gets nicely toasted. The finished pancakes get a layer of extra coconut before serving.

When Michael Mina was a boy, his parents used to take him to the now-defunct Four Seasons hotel in Seattle for Christmas brunch, where he always ordered waffles. "They were dynamite," he recalls. This recipe is as close to the one of his childhood as he could get it. Cornmeal makes the waffles crispy; ricotta keeps them moist.

“To make a proper tarte flambé, you need a wood-burning oven with a stone floor,” explains Jean-Georges Vongerichten of the thin-crusted Alsatian pizza topped with bacon, onions and fromage blanc. Here, he folds those same basic ingredients (replacing the fromage blanc with cheddar) into a light custard and bakes it in a buttery pastry crust. “Not everyone has a pizza oven at home, so I decided to make it in the form of a quiche.”

No Cuban meal is complete without a café cubano (Cuban coffee). A well-made café cubano has a thick layer of sweet crema (cream) floating over strong espresso. To get the crema right, whisk about 1 tablespoon of the espresso with sugar until it turns foamy, then pour the pot of espresso over it. Lourdes Castro says you can’t overbeat a crema, so stir it energetically.

“You can make this with any grain or fruit that goes with yogurt,” says Malin Elmlid. For her version of this cold cereal, she uses plain rolled grains, like oats or spelt, moistened with apples, coconut water and yogurt. When a friend brought her a goji-berry tree to barter for bread, she added a few berries right from the branch.

Billy Allin serves his airy, chewy homemade English muffins all day long. In the morning, he offers them with butter and jams, such as house-made peach preserves; later in the day, he might use them for BLTs and other sandwiches.

“I add everything from fresh blueberries to chocolate chips,” says Spike Gjerde of the delicious crumb coffee cake he will serve all day at his Baltimore spot, Artifact Coffee. “Of course the cakes are great with just diced apple, too.”

Elisabeth Prueitt always mixes ground flax into her pancake batter. “I’ve never felt great about the low nutritional value of pancakes—it’s like eating cake for breakfast—but the flax adds fiber, omega-3s and minerals,” she says.

According to writer and recipe developer Jess Thomson, who helped Top Pot’s owners translate their recipes for the home cook, it’s best to weigh flour on a kitchen scale instead of using measuring cups. “When we tested the recipes for the book, that seemed to make a big difference,” she says.

To create these pancakes, chefs Daniel Patterson and René Redzepi started with a standard cornmeal pancake recipe they found online. They added rice flour to make the pancakes light and served them with brown butter studded with bits of fresh lemon and sage. Like all good pancakes, they’re served with warm maple syrup, too.

This moist cake, topped by a generous layer of cardamom-spiced, pecan-dotted crumbs, is a fabulous gift. F&W’s Kate Heddings brought one to a holiday dinner party for her hosts to serve to overnight guests at breakfast the next day—“even though I wouldn’t be there to eat it!” she says. Along with the cake, she gave the Calphalon pan she baked it in, fresh-ground coffee beans and a glass container of heavy cream.